Prosopography

by Paul Rich

Prosopography, which is collective biography spiced with analysis, is closely associated with the problems of causality and the writing of "scientific" history. Categories are created and should biographical research reveal that the subjects in a group were Puseyites or Rotarians, or attended Oxford, or that all came from Devon, the implications can be explored.

At the heart of successful prosopography is taking considerable care as to which categories of information are to be gathered, as it will be difficult in the middle or the end of a study to go back and look for information for those that were missed. For example, the decision to omit as categories the place of death or church where confirmed, if they took on importance after the work was all done, might be irrevocable because country registers could not be searched again. Sherlock Holmes in The Red-Haired League (1892) was a tongue-in-cheek prosopographer when he remarked, "Beyond the obvious fact that he has at some time done manual labor, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, and that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else."

Sir Lewis Namier (1888-1960) in The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929) and other work on British parliamentarians demonstrated the technique's effectiveness, but prosopography's proponents often have been attacked for claiming too much on basis of the study of too small a selection. The inherent problem is that successful prosopography is necessarily limited in the size of group that can be studied. The selection can be nonrepresentative and too small, but biographical analysis of large groups not only requires enormous resources but often is inconclusive. One of the best uses of prosopography is for the study of an elite group such as the members of a legislature or club. A good example is R. Neale's Class and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century (1972) which examined the governors and executive councillors of the Australian colonies in 1788-1856.

Since Namier's time the technique has not featured prominently in the mainstream of historical writing. This neglect is unfortunate, because when the subject of study fits the criteria of not being too voluminous and of being fairly well-documented, it is a highly successful research tool.

Bibliography. For controversies over the proper use of historical techniques see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (1987); and David Fischer, Historians' Fallacies (1970). Someone who has successfully employed prosopography is R.S. Neale, History and Class (1983). Examples of the use of the technique would include David Potter, India's Political Administrators, 1919-1983 (1986) and Robin Bidwell, "The Political Residents of Aden", Arabian Studies V, (1979).